h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Last night I saw "Tim's Vermeer." Penn Gillette [of Penn and Teller fame] wrote and filmed this tale of an inventor [Tim Jenison] who became curious about the techniques that Johannes Vermeer used in producing his masterful oil paintings in the 17th century. Some art experts had written recent books about the possibility that Vermeer had used lenses in his work, So Tim set out to try to duplicate one of Vermeer's masterworks. Tim went to considerable effort to see the original [which hung in Buckingham Palace] and the house in which Vermeer painted. He also taught himself to use a lathe in order to make legs for the harpsichord that was in the painting. he haunted warehouses and flea markets looking for the exact fabric designs that were in the painting. he used his father-in-law, clad in period costume , as one of the figures in the painting, and his own daughter, who was a dead-ringer for the young woman depicted. He set up a room in a second story warehouse in San Antonio, arranged the people and objects exactly the same way they were in Vermeer['s painting, and set about painting, using a concave mirror that could help compare the original image with what Tim was painting. It took more than 200 days. Did I mention that Tim was not an experienced painter? The results were spectacular.

I give a thumbs-down rating to "Noah," which ends back on dry land with Noah threatening to kill Shem's newborn babies so that homo sapiens will die out without replacing itself. Ham and his youngest brother are wifeless, and unlikely to encounter any female humans after the flood.

This is such a contradiction of documents dating back almost 4,000 years that I almost don't know where to start in straightening things out.

I'm going to let a Wikipedia article do the job:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Noah#Ham.27s_descendants

I can't guarantee that the documents linked to the Wikipedia article are valid, but I would believe them before I would believe the account of a few screenwriters in present-day Hollywood .

All in all, the "Noah" film left a bad taste in my mouth. It is so mean-spirited as to seem almost from another universe. Transformer-like fallen angels which the Creator has thrown out because they helped Adam's offspring after the expulsion from Eden? Just how mean-spirited do they think the Creator is? Noah thinks the Creator is so vengeful as to want human beings to cut their own throats after they've saved the world's animals. Among other things, this would assume that the Creator wasted an entire day by creating Mankind. What, the Divine makes mistakes but can't own up to them? Is this a great role model for fallible humans to follow?

My take, for what it's worth, is that Adam and Eve had the least effective parenting of any human couple that has ever lived. Unlike his descendants, Adam was not able to learn how to become a man by observing how other men live their lives. This is because there were no other men ion the planet until Adam's sons reached the age of 21. By then, it was far too late. Eve had a parent of a sort -- Adam, from whose rib she was fashioned -- but no mother to guide her. Now, sometimes a man can be both father and mother for his motherless daughter[s]. I've seen it happen, but those daughters have other adult women as reference points in their lives.

Anyway, "Noah" raises far too few interesting points to offset the misanthropy and misogyny that run rampant in it.

Grand Budapest Hotel.

Funny, offbeat and looks great too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fg5iWmQjwk

PP.

Thanks PP - I've been wanting to ask about that. I've seen trailers and couldn't make head or tail of it. Ralph Fiennes? = must be pretty good.

I watched We Need To Talk About Kevin at the weekend, and was deeply disturbed by it.

I liked "Grand Budapest Hotel" too. Literally a few cliffhangers there .

Last night I saw "Le Weekend." How did those two *ever* stay together for 30 years .

I remember Honest Iago (?) saying that "We need to talk about Kevin" was nothing like reality and getting quite cross about it.

In this very thread, Post 6222, and

Oh.

Just goes to show how memories get distorted. He just said he thought it was too upsetting to watch.

F110512?thread=8286291

Thanks tc. I'm in an interesting thread on mumsnet, which is helping to clarify the issues somewhat. I had no idea what the movie was about before watching it, so it really did catch me unawares.

It was highly acclaimed when it came out. It made me intrigued to see it, too, but I'd have to get the DVD. According to IMDB it came out in Oct 2011 in the UK and August 2012 in Germany - so no wonder I missed it in the cinemas. (It probably had a completely different name and I wouldn't have been looking out for it so long after the excitement had died down in the British media.)

OTOH I look to films for something a bit less taxing on the emotions, as Honest Iago says he does. So I would watch three other more entertaining films rather than go for something depressing and realistic.

Lately I have run "Hugo" and "About Time" whilst doing the ironing, followed by a box set of Dr Who. I do have a couple of more heavy-going subjects lined up: "The Help" and "Inglorious Basterds", but also "The Great Gatsby".

Hugo was a beautiful film, and Sasha Baron Cohen was surprisingly good in it. The children were wonderful and the sepia tinge throughout gave it a cosy but strangely eerie atmosphere.

About Time does what it says on the Richard Curtis style tin. Domnhall Gleeson is certainly someone to look out for. I hope he manages to keep the balance between comic and sinister that his Dad has. It looks as though he has the potential for it.

I thought Grand Budapest Hotel was great. A tragi-comedy.

This months selection for the Kymab film club are

Transcendence "the real will died"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCTen3-B8GU

Wall Pfister Chris Nolon's DOP on Darknight x 3 and Inception etc is here directing in this AI gone awry tale, with Nolan in the producer's chair. Could be a good solid scifi drama.



The Raid 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9uFX3uYq4
- the first Raid was awesome. I am looking forward to see what the team can do dramatically and cinematically with this expanded story of police corruption. There was a teaser released this week in the form of a cut scene about gang warfare in the city http://youtu.be/fs_Qhmiz40E - prompting the question if this is the stuff they cut out, how good must be the stuff they left in?


Noah - we've already heard it is rubbish and perfectly able to annoy the people who think the bible is true and disappoint the secular. It's on the list only because I try to cater to popular tastes.

Amazing Spiderman 2
http://youtu.be/vzQ0S8ogs0U

Hope this doesn't end up being Spiderman 3 all over again*, but the rebooted franchise did a good job, I thought last year of setting up a new universe, with likable characters. Three villains has me nervous though, I'm hoping the plot which will reveal the Oscorp conspiracy that took away peter's parents suffiently to counter-balance, what obviously appears to be a special effect laden tour de force.




Next Month Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past are out. *skips for joy*





*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwiWx6sqlvE - if you need a reminder.

"Noah - we've already heard it is rubbish and perfectly able to annoy the people who think the bible is true and disappoint the secular" [Clive]



The title character comes off as a zealot who thinks it's his job to kill his own grandchildren, and then brands himself a failure because at the last moment he is unable to go through with it. That story line is definitely *not* from any traditional documents, nor does it have what it takes to entertain people who just wanted an animal-friendly spectacle that they could take their kids to see. The animals come off okay, thank goodness.

For what it's worth, the people who wrote Genesis may have been many things, but mathematicians they weren't. If you take Methuselah's lifespan seriously, then you have to find *some* way to account for the fact that he died more than 100 years *after* the great flood, yet there's no mention of his accompanying Noah on the ark. Some have suggested that he stowed away on the ark as an old goat . The movie shows Methuselah as a fool who can only think about finding some fresh berries even as the rain starts pounding down around him.

My money's on the notion that Noah wasn't the only one who knew how to build boats.

Come on, Methuselah, break out that boat you've got hidden in your cave, grab some wives for Ham and Japheth, and correct for Noah's mental imbalances!

I'm just curious if the rumours of 10-foot tall stone giants have any basis in truth.

Theodicy, of course, is the study of why does god permit evil. Whereas 'The Odyssey' is a long poem about a boy and his boat. And this I suspect, falls somewhere in between those two serving as definitional.

It sounds awful.

I contest with folk on facebook who tell me the flood was real (and the polystrate tree fossils prove it / didn't you hear radiometry is bunk)~
I could not, I think, be less interested in a movie of said event which adds to an already absurd plot with further absurdities.

Archaeologists tells us that there have been regional floods in places like western Washington State, where the lip of a pool of meltwater from the glaciers tipped down periodically. Yes, there have been floods, but a flood on such a scale that the ark settled on the top of Mount Ararat [or any other mountain] begs the question of where the water went after the rain stopped. I like the story as a warm, fuzzy fantasy focused on doing good in an emergency. If the rest of humankind had tried to cling to the ark to save themselves, the ark would have gone under, and *nobody* would have been saved. I'm willing to suspend disbelief, but the storyteller has got to make it worth my while.

Has anyone seen "Divergent" or "Bad Words?" The first sounds like a ripoff of "Hunger games," and the second is the sort of mind-candy that Jason Bateman is fond of releasing in late winter/early spring [Last march he released "Identity Thief"]. Neither one sounds worth the price of a movie ticket.

I saw the trailer for Divergent at a friend's behest.

'Hunger Games Rip-off' is exactly what I thought, not that that is itself terribly original.

Regarding Noah's flood

Floods DO occur, this is not surprising, and probably lays at the heart of The Noah Fantasy.

My favourite debunking involves trees.

when I last I checked, the minimum age of the earth deducible from counting the tree rings was 12,410 years. Already this is double what most fundamentalists will takes as the age of the entire planet as is derived from nothing more complex that counting the number of rings of overlapping tree chronologies by identifying years with matching growth rings chronologies have been established that go back over twelve thousands years.

Now since we know the optical density of water is such that at about 1000m down no light penetrates and is known as 'the midnight zone' for submersibles for this reason, and since the Holocene database of tree rings is gathered from samples all around the world at at various different altitudes up to the tree-line, and since in Genesis 7:19 it says very explicitly that the flood overtopped the mountains, we can be fairly certain that no tree so submerged for about 5 months (give or take average lengths and leap years) means NO photosynthesis or gas exchange (cellulose is a carbon-based molecule, the carbon being extracted from the CO2 of the air) - it is highly unlikely that any tree would survive this flood let alone grow.

So it is odd that we find over 12,410 years of tree ring growth all around the planet. The obvious and fatal conclusion for flood proponents is that no such global flood has occurred for at least the last twelve and a half centuries.


Genesis 7:19-24
//19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. 20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.[a][b] 21 Every living thing that moved on land perished – birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.//

So how did the microbes and pathogens that reside in particular populations survive, or all the fragile marine ecosystems?


Arrgh - it makes no sense. Almost certainly nonsense and not to be believed by any thinking person.

You know how a sprinkling of snow turns into stories of there being 6 inches of the stuff and drifts up to your waist, even the next week? Well, think floods on the scale of the Somerset 'Tsunami' of 1607. Think about how a boat washed 50 feet up a hill after a couple of thousands of years of re-telling turns into the top of the mountain.

PP.

I agree that the story already had some major absurdities. My point was that the filmmakers managed the difficult task of throwing in some stuff that was even *more* absurd, but without an end product that was even remotely entertaining. Anthony Hopkins was wasted as Methuselah . What was he thinking, getting involved with such a project?

"Captain America -- the winter soldier" has opened in my area. I expect to see it on Monday. I like Chris Evans. I think he was in another superhero film -- "The Fabulous Four" or something like that.

Noah.

Tosh.

PP.

"Divergent" was hardly better. Why do so many futuristic films paint such bleak scenarios for the future?

Because it's easier to create a future world from the typical post-apocalyptic nightmare than it is to actually sit down and think about how the future might be, how we get from here to there.

It's easier to believe "Hey, we nuked ourselves" and then "everyone realised their mistake and worked together" than it is to the believe most of what writers come up with.

Whatever a sci-fi writer does, it has to have an element of believe in it, else it's pure fantasy.

Personally, I'm fed up with post-apocalyptic settings. Unless that scenario plays a major part in the set-up or character development, it's lazy writing.

I concur with the comments about Grand Budapest Hotel. We enjoyed playing "spot-the-star" and some of the scenes were laugh-out-loud, especially with an audience full of oldies

I loved the line: "She was dynamite in the sack, you know" "But she was 84 years old!" "I've had older"

GB